“Flava In Ya Ear” Sample Finally Identified After 32 Years
The post “Flava In Ya Ear” Sample Finally Identified After 32 Years appeared first on Stereogum .
The first release ever to come out on Bad Boy Records was "Flava In Ya Ear," the late Long Island rapper Craig Mack's 1994 debut single. It's a classic piece of '90s New York rap expressionism, driven by a dusty boom-bap beat from the great producer Easy Mo Bee. It quickly became a huge crossover hit, reaching #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. As someone who was in ninth grade when the track came out, I heard it all the time .
These days, "Flava In Ya Ear" is even better-known for its iconic posse-cut remix. Biggie Smalls opened that remix, and his endlessly quotable verse was a key part of his rise. LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, and Rampage also appeared on the remix, and the Hype Williams-directed video is one of the key documents of its era. Craig Mack passed away in 2018 at the age of 46, and "Flava In Ya Ear" was his defining legacy.
Easy Mo Bee's "Flava In Ya Ear" beat is driven by what I always though was a detuned two-note horn riff. I was wrong. In a 2014 Youtube interview, Easy Mo Bee said that he made that beat in his underwear after waking up one morning, using a stack of records that he'd bought the day before, and that the riff was "a guitar, but with a lot of reverb, a huge throw of reverb. But it carries the song. You would think that you need all of these big, busy elements for a melody to carry the song. That, those two notes, that was the melody. That's what carried the song, and everything else was built around that."
Nobody had ever positively identified the record that Easy Mo Bee sampled for those two notes. Back then, rap producers took care in disguising the samples that they chopped up, making them difficult to trace, not just for legal reasons, but as part of the art. Recently, though, a YouTuber who goes by the name ShakerMaker has been uploading discoveries from the Sample Sanctuary Discord, and they have evidently figured out the source of the "Flava In Ya Ear."
According to these folks, the "Flava In Ya Ear" beat uses two isolated guitar notes from the jazz guitarist Melvin Sparks' 1971 version of the 1932 Broadway standard "Alone Together." Apparently, those two notes come from the middle of a solo, and they have been slowed down and blasted with effects until they're completely unrecognizable.
The people in the same Discord also claim that they recently figured out a previously undiscovered sample from Stardust's 1998 house classic "Music Sounds Better With You."
I'm fascinated by the way some people can listen to music. How do you figure out how to turn that sample into the "Flava In Ya Ear" beat? And then, how do you find it, decades later?
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